LE What is a "good" poly-count for a model?

[Werne]

So, today I decided to make my first model for Skyrim (finally) but I'm not sure what is a "good" poly-count for a model. More specifically, for a sword, this thing right here (yeh, I know, It's crappy, but I like it):

 

Blender says this:

833 Vertices

2493 Edges

1662 Faces

 

And as you can see here in the rendered wireframe it has a lot of triangles on the handle and the small blade-like thigy on the back, I'll just apply a decimate modifier to reduce it.

 

But I wanted to ask is what's the desired poly-count for a model like a sword or an axe or stuff like that (cause those are the things I'm going to make)?

Edited December 30, 2011 by Werne

[Ghogiel]

1662 tri would be perfectly acceptable for a sword imo. It is a bit dense looking on the handle there, your hand covers most of it up when it will be viewed close up in scene, so that is looking a tad wasteful for the that part of it, but the total count isn't over the top, but could be reduced some

[Werne]

Yeah, I really overdid it on the handle, I don't keep track on the number of faces when working, I only look at it when I'm finished or when my computer starts to freeze beacause of too much of them :laugh:.

 

So, 1600 is acceptable, I always thought it should be around 1000, 1200 max. Ah, well, I was wrong (not the first time). But I like to keep my models below 1000, I reduced the number of faces down on the sword to almost a half, and it still looks pretty good, no weird distorsions and stuff.

Now blender says this:

 

445 Vertices

1329 Edges

886 Faces

[Ghogiel]

So, 1600 is acceptable, I always thought it should be around 1000, 1200 max.

For an object that sits right in front of the camera taking up like 20% of your screen for most of the game, 1600 tri would not be too much. However specifically for that actual model it was being a bit wasteful in places

[Vagrant0]

For Skyrim, I would say somewhere around 1000-1600 for a world model, 2000-3000 for an equipped weapon/shield, 14000-22000 for full body model, 14000-22000 for generic buildings, 30000 for unique special buildings (essentially double Oblivion's values).

 

The main thing to consider really is the number of those items which would likely be present in any one scene, and to make sure that they're optimized as well as you can get them. Less is usually better when you can get away with it using normal maps and textures.

[JDGameArt]

It rely depends on what your trying to do. I'm not sure if you ever seen the Frostmourne mod for Oblivion, but I loaded it up in max once and it was somewhere around 51,000 tris. It's so detailed, It's like swinging around a full body mesh with armor lol.

 

Bethesda's Dawnbreaker without the FX billboard is 2006 tris. So somewhere between 1500-4000 is still fine. But like as mentioned before, just try to keep things as optimized as possible.